Google has you covered abroad
JUST HOW MUCH CAN YOU RELY ON YOUR SMARTPHONE WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO GET AROUND IN A STRANGE LAND?
Throw away your maps. Ditch your guide books. Fire your travel agent. All you need for your next holiday is your smartphone.
Mobile phone apps have changed many of the ways many of us do things, but can a traveller rely solely on his phone in 2015? Better yet, would you trust it enough to go in a foreign city — a place you’ve never been to and presumable don’t speak the language.
Google recently invited journalists from around Europe and the Middle East to Madrid, Spain to test out that theory. For two days, journos used an array of Google apps to run down little alleyways, take pictures of local landmarks, and eat insane amount of local foods — basically, just being tourists.
Since this was Google’s show, the focus was on their apps, which include Maps, Translate, Photos, Google Now, and Voice search (not strictly an app, but a feature built into a number of apps).
The Apps
The app we used most often was Maps. That sounds a little dull, since people have been using Maps for years to get around, but this apps do much more than tell you how to get from Point A to Point B. There are features ideally suited for tourists, such as being able to tell the app to search for restaurants (or museums, malls, or anything else you can search for) and making sure its within walking distance. You can even tell the Maps whether you want to walk, drive or take public transport.
Once you’ve found what you are looking for, you can also get reviews and a “street view” — literally a picture of the place you want to go — so you know exactly what it looks like before you get there.
Madrid is an excellent place for testing this out, since the city is a warren of small alleys with museum and restaurants hidden in every tiny alcove. We went looking for small, local art galleries and within a half-hour, we were able to find two of the three we where looking for. We would have given up if we had to rely on traditional maps.
When it comes to the big ticket items — National Museums and famous restaurants — Maps was dead on. The program also has a built-in GPS, so you can make sure you’re on the right path the whole time.
Maps can also be used to find hotels. You can’t book hotels directly in maps, but it will giving you an estimate from Booking.com. However, I suggest you stick with a dedicated hotel app, such as Expedia or Orbitz.
An unexpected but very practical use for Maps was getting around in cabs. Most of the taxi drivers we met could only speak Spanish, which made giving directions a bit of a problem. Solution? Just hand the smartphone to the cabbie and point. The cabbies we encountered loved it.
We discovered this when one driver even pulled out his own iPhone and did a voice-search on the spot since the address we gave him was a little vague. He found the restaurant we were looking for — hidden in a building within a building — and even gave us instructions on how to find it once we got out of the cab.
Voice
Voice search was probably the second most used function on our trip. Frequently, we couldn’t see our smartphone screen due to glare from the bright sunshine, so being able to press a button and speak to the phone directly came in very handy. The voice search features prominently in Maps and can verbally tell you — in real time as you walk. Go Left. Turn Right — how to get where you want to go.
However, Voice was the one feature that resulted in one of the biggest discussions we had with Google. Voice is very similar to a regular Google search, in that your results are only as good as your query. You can’t always get what you want, and unlike the song, you won’t always get what you need.
One journalist asked “What is the Mercado de San Miguel?” Mercado in Spanish means market, so we were a little unimpressed when we where told: “The Mercado de San Miguel is a market in Madrid.” It’s accurate, but ultimately useless. Further attempts really didn’t improve the quality of the search. Google search often returns the popular results, not the most useful. If you’re looking for interesting places to visit, relying on a Voice search may not be the best idea.
Translate
However, the Voice feature was a hit with the cabbies. When you use Voice with the Translate app, you can speak in English (or 11 other languages) and the App will speak the proper translation. Want to go to the biggest museum in Madrid? Speak into the phone and say “Take me to the Prado.” The app will then say “Llévame al Prado.” You don’t even had to worry about saying it right. Remember that questions may get you in trouble, since — for reasons I don’t pretend to understand — people we spoke to often seemed to forget we were using software and would begin to speak to us — not the phone — in Spanish.
The Google Translate Apps also had a couple of other usable functions that don’t include Voice. You can always type in what you want translated, but it’s easier to take a picture. This worked especially well with menus. The apps would scan the menu and then give an English translation in plain text. When you’re not using Voice, Google Translate can translate more than 90 languages, including Arabic.
One last feature from Translate was a live-streaming application, in which you held you smart phone over the text you want translated and the app turned the image — streaming live to your screen via your camera — into the language of your choice. It was a great idea, in theory. In practice, the technology has a long way to go. Some words would get translated and others wouldn’t. Stick with Voice, typing or taking a picture.
Schedule
Speaking of emails, Google Now is what the company calls an intelligent personal assistant. It works with your Gmail account, as well as Expedia and presumably many other apps, to consolidate your travel plans in an interactive list you can swipe right to access. Without me having to enter everything, Google Now had my travel itinerary and hotel reservation ready to view, and since it is interactive, I can click on my hotel reservation to see where it is located in the Maps app.
The software also tries to anticipate your needs. It saw I was travelling to Spain, so it included a basic version of the translate app and a currency converter.
The verdict? Yes, you can navigate, discover, translate and, in general, survive in a foreign land with nothing but your mobile phone, but let’s be frank, you may want to ease yourself into it. It’s not as simple as it seems on paper. Pre-planning for your trip before departing is still advisable, but if you need a restaurant, a menu translated and directions, Google has you covered.